For the love of writing

I didn't enjoy writing as a child.  I hated it, actually.  Thank you notes, paragraph-long stories, what-I-want-for-Christmas compositions, every essay in school...they were agony.  I never enjoyed writing until my senior year of high school when we had mandatory free writing every day in English class.  Something about writing anything I wanted until a timer went off appealed to me.

I'm glad writing and I finally became friends, but I'd love for my children to enjoy writing from the beginning.  Tonight I read a fantastic article with great ideas for inspiring children to write.  Journaling, letter writing, emailing and postcard exchanging are ways she inspires her little girl to write.

On a related note, I believe in making children write thank you notes.  I do, however, do what I can to make them enjoyable to write so that my children don't come to resent the task.  I also keep the note writing age appropriate.  For example, for a first birthday, I might trace their hand and let them scribble a bit with a crayon.  For the second birthday, I might let them go crazy with stickers.  Actually, that's exactly what I've done with my two so far, but the next child could have different likes and skills.

Mikey just finished his thank you notes for his second birthday.  He enjoyed making them, so much so that Ellie got a little jealous, so I handed her a pile of Christmas cards, thanks to Daddy's genius.  Mikey had to get in on the Christmas card madness, too.  The only downside to all this was Ellie's disappointment that the cards we mail don't come back to us.  Somebody send this poor girl some mail!  :o)

She colored ornaments on the tree and added a star

Ellie noticed that the trees on the cards were triangles, so I gave her a bunch of foam triangle stickers and let her go to town